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Australian scientists knew in advance that southern Asia was
going to be hit by a destructive tsunami but were powerless to save
lives because that part of the world has no early-warning
system.

Such a system would have given people on the Thai coast 15
minutes' warning. People in Sri Lanka and India would have had
longer to flee to higher ground.

The far-flung Australian territory of Cocos Island, 1000
kilometres from Sumatra, has a warning station designed to give
Australia three to four hours' notice if a tsunami is headed for
our shores.

Bureau of Meteorology spokesman Phil Cummins said the station
had picked up the fast-moving deep-water swell caused by the
weekend's earthquake.

But, unlike Pacific nations, which have a system to warn of
tsunamis, no such arrange-ment exists for the Indian Ocean. This
prevents Australian scientists and authorities from contacting
their counterparts in other countries.

Australia's national agency for geological research, Geoscience
Australia, said it alerted Emergency Management Australia half an
hour after the massive earthquake.

That information was sent to Australian emergency services,
police and the army, but not to Indian Ocean villages that needed
it most.

"Had there been (an Indian Ocean alert system), I think there
would have been time for people in Sri Lanka, across in the
Maldives or somewhere like that to have done something about it,"
said Geoscience Australia chief executive Phil McFadden.

But for places closer to the epicentre, such as the Thai resort
island of Phuket, there would have been very little time.

"Bear in mind that these waves travel through the ocean about
500 km/h. They're pretty darn fast," Dr McFadden said.

"Phuket's about 400 kilometres from Aceh, so it would have taken
about three-quarters of an hour for the wave to get across (to)
Phuket.

"I think we reacted about as fast as anybody, and that was half
an hour, so if they had been on an alert system that had been
direct, they might have had 15 minutes' warning.

"I'm not certain what they could have done in that time."

Dr McFadden said the need for an alert system for the Indian
Ocean had been discussed but its cost and effectiveness were
problematic.

Indian authorities agreed that such a measure should be
considered, but said their emphasis had been on warning systems for
cyclones, which were much more common in the region.

Nothing like Sunday's wave had been experienced in living memory
or even folk memory.

The chief of India's National Institute of Oceanography, Satish
Shetye, said a tidal wave savaging the metropolis of Chennai was as
believable as the drowning of Fifth Avenue in New York in the film
The Day After Tomorrow.

Dr McFadden said there were potential problems with warning
systems if information was not provided appropriately and on
time.

"Half the people go down to the beach to have a look instead of
getting in their car or on horses or whatever and getting up to
high ground," he said.

"This is why it's quite expensive to have an effective tsunami
warning service because you have to inform the police, the local
services. You have to have people going out and actually saying 'Go
to high ground, do not go towards the ocean, stop all your scuba
diving and other tours'.

Another problem was that occasionally, after a warning, tsunamis
did not happen and people could be injured or killed scrambling to
high ground.

"But it is something that those areas need to think about
seriously - getting a proper alert system," he said.

In Los Angeles, the head of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre,
Charles McCreery, said US officials who detected the undersea quake
tried frantically to get a warning out about the tsunami but were
hampered by the lack of an official alert system.

"We tried to do what we could. We don't have any contacts in our
address book for anybody in that particular part of the world," he
said.